Monday, January 9, 2017

Book Release: "World Cultures: Analyzing Pre-Industrial Societies"

Well, it's finally out! Clocking in at 221 pages and around 64,700 words, World Cultures: Analyzing Pre-Industrial Societies in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas covers as many aspects of life and culture as I could cram between two covers. This includes

I attempted to cover as many cultures as I could, as broadly as I could, in order to give readers an understanding both of how societies work generally as well as outlying peculiarities and unique cultural paradigms. I definitely put a lot of work into it, but it is available for free if you so choose. I would certainly appreciate any donations but it is honestly more important to have people read it than to make money off of it, so please do not feel obligated to spend money if that would dissuade you from getting it. And if you do find it informative and/or entertaining, please do me a huge favor and tell people about it.

Thanks, Brett. Ideally I'd just have people pay what they want - $2.99 is the cheapest it lets me go without price-matching it. It's not that I don't think the book is worth anything, but rather I want people to be able to choose on their own. That's all.

Nope. Thought about it, ended up deciding not to; every claim can be googled to find the same sources I used & it's a free book anyways. With the number of things I talk about in the book it would have given me a pretty substantial workload to cite every single source that I used.

Even if I did cite sources you'd still have to look them up yourselves to verify their reliability. And what would those sources say? Why, they'd refer to other sources. So you can either go on this indefinite goose chase or you can just, you know, google it yourself.

Youre kinda right, but you need a source otherwise youre playing the fool. I read on the internet from about 3 different places that the story of the bible is just a blatant copy of the egyptian book of the dead. So i watched a documentary and it said that its not just the book of the dead buts countless other religious places. It said the story that there was a virgin birth, a bright star, and 3 men bringing gifts to a later miracle worker who died on the cross, it said that story was in "almost" every single religious text since who knows. I believed him. The documentary had a lot of intricate details, and i thought, who would lie about this? How could he come up with so many small details? He must be right. Wrong. Every single detail was completely fabricated. Not slightly adjusted from the real truth. Completely. Completely. Fabricated. He made ALL of it up. By himeself. And i believed him because i was being stupid and i didnt want to put any work into research. There was no link between the bible and the book of the dead. What bullshit. You cant believe anybody. You always got to know the heart of the matter and the only thing you can trust is your reasoning.

So three different places cited that source, but the source itself turned out to be wrong? Sounds like exactly what I was just talking about. You should do research yourself; none of my claims are particularly obscure. And if I used an obscure source (i.e. a first-hand contemporary account) I noted it in the text.

Loving the book, I've highlighted a lot of interesting stuff so far! Will be picking up a paperback version soon. This might seem like an odd question, but have you ever considered compiling some of this blog into an (e)book as a primer on believability in fiction?